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Being here in Beijing reminds me of how much I enjoy traveling internationally. It can be stressful to not speak the language or wonder if you’ve just spent too much on something, but I actually kind of enjoy that feeling of dislocation.

Being in a different culture is sometimes obvious, like seeing roasted scorpions on skewers or watching a busy intersection in action:

But sometimes, the most discombobulating moments of being in a different culture are when things seem very similar, but work very differently. Which is a philosophical way of saying — a Chinese bank machine ate our ATM card!

So. As it turns out, Chinese ATMs do not always work the same way as ATMs in the United States. Some are only for deposits, some for withdrawals. Most importantly, mistakes in card usage or even taking too long can result in the machine eating your card.

Here are some pro tips about using Chinese ATMs we learned the hard way.

1. Never use an ATM that doesn’t have an option for English.
2. Do not use a machine that is not attached to a bank office where you can go in and ask for help if something goes awry.
3. If the machine starts beeping like a timer is counting down, remove the card immediately by pressing the button for “eject card,” provided that you know how to read Chinese. If you do not know how to read Chinese, note point 1.

We suspended our card, just in case. Then we went to the front desk to ask for help and — there was Dennis, the nice man who picked us up from the airport. He took the matter in hand, called the bank and talked and talked, furrowed his brow, raised his voice, talked some more.

(In the meantime, here are some photos from our day at a Tibetian Buddhist temple and environs).

Back to the ATM card incident of 2017: Dennis helped us settle it. The bank will call the front desk when they’ve recovered the card and the front desk will call Dennis and Dennis will let us know. It should take about a week. 

Luckily, we are traveling with a competent adult (Kate) who has an ATM card, so we are totally fine. Also, we pawned off some of Mr. and Mrs. G’s antiques and electronics for extra cash. Just kidding, Mr. and Mrs. G! Just checking to see if you’re reading!

We had a fun day hiking a remote part of the Great Wall with a company called Beijing Hikers, but now jet lag is hitting me like a ton of bricks, so I’ll keep this short. Hiking along the wall itself wasn’t too bad, but getting up  to and from the wall was very steep and challenging. Note to self: when a company tells you a hike is “strenuous,” believe them.

The wall was built over several dynasties at unspeakable human cost. While the towers were useful for signaling an attack, and while the top of the wall served as a kind of road in sections, the Great Wall did very little to keep unwanted people out. Hmm–a lesson for our current political leaders, perhaps?

 

We are in Beijing to visit Mr. and Mrs. G,  dear friends who currently live and work here. Due to a scheduling mismatch related to when Kate has to be at her summer job, we have arrived in China while Mr. and Mrs. G are still away on their trip abroad. Being the world’s best hosts, they hired someone to pick us up from the airport. We were delayed in Hong Kong and worried that our driver might have given up, but when we emerged from customs at 1:30 am, bleary-eyed from almost 24 hours of travel, there was Dennis. Yay! Thank you, Mr. and Mrs. G!

The next morning, I got to meet up with a fellow Wallie (the nickname of people with MFAs from Warren Wilson College). This Wallie is a friend of Mrs. G’s (who is very good at connecting people) and it was really wonderful to meet up, drink coffee and talk about life, reading, and writing. Also, she helped me buy a sim card for my phone, a process that happened 100% in Chinese. Since I only know three phrases in Mandarin, I very much appreciated the help. When it comes to signing up for a data plan, “hello,” “thank you,” and “you don’t look very well,” would probably not have cut it.

Then it was lunch — delicious cold noodles from a cart–and onto Tiananmen Square and the Forbidden City.

The cold noodles we’d had for lunch were so good, we decided to check out Wangfujing Street, one of several areas in Beijing dedicated to street food. And there were many, many delicious things to eat.

And, there were lots of things that stretched my sense of what constituted “delicious.” It also seemed that anything that could be roasted, toasted, or fried and put on a stick, was.

We ended the night with something that has universal appeal: jasmine tea-flavored soft serve.